Your name is John. John Joseph Woods, to be specific. But all your friends call you just Joe. You are the youngest of the “poor family living on subsidies.” In addition to you, your family has a father (Abe Woods, African American), a mother (Ramona Woods, Mexican), 5 older brothers and 3 older sisters. You Your family was quite satisfied with the current situation. Both father and mother were categorically opposed to you leaving anywhere, especially to study, ESPECIALLY to another state.
Especially the father.
But he decided that it would even be better this way, that it was time to move to a new level, and this requires well-educated specialists in their field. Your father runs a local gang dealing in drugs, contract robberies, weapons, illegal augmentations and the devil knows what else. And he needs people he can trust. And who can they be if not your children? Well, with 0 reservations, of course … But you do not share their beliefs, goals and desires, you are disgusted by crime, you want to prove that people like you can also fulfill their “American dream” , but completely legal methods. But you are forced to pretend that you share “their” goals, and for this you are studying in order to help your father later. “Let me just get out of this viper, and dick you will ever see me again!” - so you think every night, going to bed.
Why are you counting the days until you leave? The fact is that you just graduated from high school in your native Arlington, having one of the best exam results in the history of the city. They even wrote about it in the newspapers, calling it a young genius, a child prodigy, which, perhaps, will move science forward by leaps and bounds. After proper training, of course. Against the background of your “official” social status, a crowdfunding campaign was launched in local newspapers and radio (and on the Internet, of course), under the slogan “We won’t let a young talent blow his abilities down the drain!” Let’s pay him to study where he wants!”
At first, my father wanted to keep somewhere around 60% of the collected amount for himself, for “the needs of the organization,” as he said, but then he changed his mind (yeah, yeah, you convinced him that he needed you as a high-class specialist, and for this you need to study at a university, and such universities are usually very expensive). And tomorrow is the last morning you spend at home. After all, you’re going to study at MIT! Tomorrow, at 11 am, a train leaves for Austin, and then with a change to Boston. And there, to Cambridge, where MIT is located, is already within easy reach.
You are so glad, because you will finally break out of this “vicious circle” in which your great-grandfather, grandfather lived, and now your father and your brothers live. This year, 205X, will be the year from which your new life will begin! And, perhaps, it will be the year that will be indicated in future biographies dedicated to you as the beginning of your studies as the “Great Scientist of Modernity”! Yes, you are not without ambition. And you’re ready to work like hell to make your dreams and ambitions come true. All my life, if needed.
A little over a year later:
And so, a little more than a year has passed that you spent on admission and the first year of study itself, you can proudly call yourself an MIT student. You have chosen such a specialty as “Design and development of cybernetic / bionic prostheses and augmentations” and have already completed the first course. The summer holidays are here and you can finally relax and unwind. Weight last year you were busy. Very busy: preparation, admission, first lectures, new friends and, of course, studies. In fact, you would put your studies in the first place on this list, friends and everything else went according to the residual principle. After classes and homework, coupled with additional self-education in the library and the Internet, you barely had the strength to crawl to bed and occasionally, to the nearest cafe for a quick bite. But now you can rest normally and gain strength before the next year. When you walked into your favorite cafe, you turned your head around, looking at the surrounding cityscapes for the first time. Up to this point, you had neither the desire nor the strength to do so. Out of the corner of your eye, you noticed a small store that sold various storage media, whether it was DVDs and BR discs, as well as SSDs. “Such stores began to appear in the early 2040s, gradually replacing the “classic” bookstores, in view of the ever-decreasing cost of producing such media, in contrast to the price of printed books,” you recalled. You decided to go in and look at the assortment provided by the store. Basically, there were interactive educational materials, the same books and object guides (object - in the sense of a 3D model with descriptions of the purpose and which can be disassembled down to the last screw with explanations about the dimensions and materials used), but there was also an entertainment department. In particular, VRTI games (Virtual Reality of Total Immersion). VRTI, as such, appeared relatively recently, in the mid-2040s. First it was remote jobs, then cinemas, then virtual tourism, and of course, games of all stripes began to appear.You remembered how your grandfather told you and your brothers and sisters that it was the beginning of the 2010s, when the first attempts to create a full-fledged virtual reality began to appear. What was the name of that first device in the form of glasses and handles? BUT! Oculum Drift! But it was actually not Virtual Reality, as it is now, but only a rough simulation of it. But that was only the beginning. As it turned out later, without a neural interface, which would transmit incoming information directly to the brain, to the appropriate departments (that is, visual information to the lobes of the brain responsible for vision; sound information to the lobes responsible for sound; information about the position of the body and movements - to the cerebellum ), thereby creating a temporary artificial sensory deprivation for the body, it is simply impossible to create a FULL virtual reality. Games were your only outlet where you could relieve stress.
They “Were” intended to.
Until you make it out here to Massachusetts. Now you practically didn’t have time for them, and didn’t really want to, to be honest. So as you walked past the shelves of SSDs, you glanced over the titles, automatically noting what you played and what you didn’t. To your regret, you have already played almost all of them and they were completely uninteresting to you. With a disappointed sigh, you turned around and was about to leave the store, when out of the corner of your eye you noticed something on the periphery that you had not seen before.
This made you stop abruptly and, turning in that direction, squat down: on the bottom shelf, almost out of sight of a standing person, there was a standard hard case with the same standard SSD drive, which is now used as an external medium, like ancient flash drives. The front side showed a picture of a bunch of small multi-colored animals, vaguely resembling a cross between a pony who knows who, since there were such mythical animals as unicorns, pegasi and even alicorns. The colorful title, with multi-colored dancing letters, read: “Life is like Fluffy!”. Skeptically, you flipped the case back and read the advertising text, accompanied by separate screenshots, visible only through the augmented reality provided by the neural interface.The description said that you are trying on the role of an ordinary fluffy, living his usual life, depending on the chosen starting conditions. It’s not that you didn’t know about fluffy, no, you knew about them, but very indirectly, since Texas, being a southern (and therefore warm) state, allowed Fluffy to breed at the speed of some rabbits in Australia … Because of This Texas was on the so-called “KOS-list”, where all fluffy “savages” were to be destroyed on the spot. So, to meet such a fluffy was possible only deep in the countryside, and even then it was unlikely. Being a purely urban dweller, you have never seen them alive. The game, as it turned out, supported different levels of difficulty and initial conditions, and had the possibility of co-op passage up to the MMO level! What you found odd is that despite the overtly “childish” character design, she was rated NC-21 and labeled NSFW. It surprised you beyond measure.
After staring at this tag in bewilderment, you decided to give this game a chance and try it as soon as you get home, at the same time you decided to call your friends. For company. Since it is a sin not to take advantage of the opportunities of a cooperative when this cooperative exists. You gave a mental command and a message was sent to all subscribers that you are waiting for them there and there, and you have business with them. After 10-15 minutes, 3 of your friends with their girls entered the store. “Excellent!” - you thought, “It is always more interesting to play with a big company!” and mentally rubbed his hands in anticipation. All the time until they arrived, you were surfing the Internet in search of reviews and tutorials on the game, but, to your surprise, you just found that the game was made just a month after your arrival, and then you were not at all up to games. And that’s it! It was very strange, but at the same time it was inspiring beyond measure! After a short hello and new acquaintances, you still managed to persuade them to buy a copy for themselves and play with you until you all get bored. After the purchase, you went out and the whole crowd went to the same cafe, where you spent the rest of the evening, having fun and relaxing. After that, almost before the campus closed, you all gathered in your room, and, having created a voice conference, as well as checking the time and completing all the procedures necessary to launch, launched the “GAME”. On the choice of difficulty, you collectively decided to choose the initial level (it was called the “home fluffy level”), and then after you get used to the controls, move to a higher one. The choice was due to the fact that, judging by the description of the difficulty levels, “Home Fluffy” is actually a sandbox tutorial with the softest conditions possible. The next level - “Rural fluffy savage” already provided some (and sometimes very significant) difficulties for survival. The highest level was “Urban Fluffy Savage” due to the increased number of dangers. The “transitions” between difficulty levels were quite obvious and interchangeable, under certain conditions. Next came the choice of the country (yes, it turned out that you can choose not only the USA!), state, city or locality, right up to the house! It was unusual. True, in regards to homemade fluffies, the choice was relatively small, only about 30,000 options in total across the state, ranging from the so-called “Ekshpwowin’ babeh” to the elderly. In more complex versions, “Villagers”, as you decided to call them, had a much larger number, but not so much. Somewhere around a dozen million across the US, you haven’t looked at the rest of the countries. The “urban” ones prevailed in numbers: there were about 800 million of them throughout the United States and almost 23 billion worldwide! This figure shocked you all! After all, only 37 years have passed since the appearance of these fluffies in the mid-2010s! Horror! So breed! It is not surprising that agriculture and the mining industry fell into decline… But it gave a powerful kick to many other industries. Including the industry that you have chosen for yourself. But back to our sheep. You all decided to start out as “home” “Weaned babeh” in a town near Cambridge and after mastering the management and general rules, escape and become “Villagers”. Guys chose foals, girls, respectively, fillies. You chose a neon orange unicorn, it has a red mane, tail and eyes with hooves. The horn was also red. Matt, your first friend is a light blue pegasus with dark green eyes and purple mane, tail and hooves. The flight feathers of the wings were also light green in color. The usual feathers covering his stumps were of the same purple color, smoothly turning into light blue. Steve (your second friend) chose a steel-colored earth with black mane, tail and hooves, but his eyes were amber. Liu (Your third friend) also chose an earthy, but acid crimson with a mane, tail and hooves of the same acid green color and eyes of a deep gray, almost black, color. The girls, as one, chose fillies of “girlish” colors, that is, pink, peach, white, and their combinations. For about a week, you figured out the controls and had fun from the heart, getting used to playing out your simple roles given in the “training part”, because the main fun will begin later, the main thing is to wait for the right moment. You met every day in the same cafe and discussed the events that happened to you in the game, planned your development and what you would do and how when you become “Villagers”…Summer and autumn after:
Here the summer is over. You all had a great time these 5 months in this fun game, but now December has come and you have a session on your nose: right before the Christmas holidays there will be the last exam, so it’s time to put the entertainment aside and harness yourself to study, pull up the tails of whoever has them and after that you can go back and continue if you want. During these 5 months you have achieved a lot, both in the game and in life, including relationships. But more, of course, in the game. You, as the one who dragged them there, were unanimously appointed as the Leader of their “gang”. After a couple of weeks, when you finally got the hang of how to walk and talk so as not to arouse the suspicions of your play moms and dads, you were all able to escape and met at the outskirts, as agreed. This is how your “Rural Epic” as you called it began. On the first day you went further and further deep into the forest, away from the city. the next day, you started building a permanent parking lot. The case was a lot of work. Everything was complicated to the extreme by the fact that fluffies turned out to be, well, completely unadapted to life in the wilderness - they do not have full-fledged hands to hold things; the muscles are weak, so that anything heavy cannot be pushed or pulled long enough; the eyes have rather limited angles of movement and vision (a lot of blind spots, right in front of the nose, for example, due to the inability to close your eyes to look at the tip of the nose), besides, for the most part, all fluffies are rather short-sighted - things are further than 2-3 meters from them for them they already blur into a continuous spot; In order to see what is happening behind the back, it is enough for a person to turn the body, and the neck, and slightly squint the eyes, while fluffy has to turn around with the whole body due to the short body and neck (well, the angles of eye movement, yes, yes). the limbs were also very clumsy and clumsy due to the bulk of the down, and the fact that the joints could move much more freely than in real ponies or in other animals did not help here at all. It turned out that the pads of the hooves are too tender for rough work like digging the earth or picking grass - they are immediately covered with either abrasions (when digging) or cuts (when trying to pick grass). And you also found out using the example of girls that that colored edging at the hooves, resembling nails, breaks and exfoliates very easily, causing severe pain.Because of this, almost all the “hard” work was done by you guys, leaving the girls only the role of food gatherers, no matter how they resented this attitude and tried to accuse you of sexism and male chauvinism. True, you don’t know whether it was you who chose such fluffies, or whether this is typical of absolutely all fluffies. After a month of living in the forest, you realized that you were starting to fail with your small company and decided to find NPCs to help you. A week later, you managed to find a local herd and “took” it for yourself. True, for this they had to kill their Smarty Girl with her Strong friends. Nothing complicated really, how much fantasy you have played where there was free PvP… Tactics always decide! Especially against those who have no idea about tactics, he-he-he-he. Armed with improvised weapons in the form of sharply broken dry twigs, and sharp pebbles that you had to hold with your mouth, you simply fell on him all together, without entering into negotiations with him, at the same time, and stabbed and trampled her to death. And then all of them drove weak & powerless, and go under your rulership. All this happened before the eyes of the rest of the herd, which in shock and horror looked at this massacre. Many vomited and fought on the spot, a couple of mares died of a heart attack when they realized that now no one will protect 'em from you, if you had such an intention. Apparently they were the girlfriends of those strong ones in the retinue of the smart girl. After establishing your authority, you have established a clear hierarchy and responsibilities for everyone. True, you were at a loss why many began to whimper, piss and shit for themselves at your approach. But you weren’t interested in that, you decided that it was just the developers messed up somewhere with the prescription of behavioral reactions for NPCs. The next day it turned out that half the herd had fled, and the rest were looking at your group with bewilderment and even more fear in their senseless little eyes, but you did not attach any importance to this. While you and the guys were putting things in order again and handing out tasks, reinforcing the words with cuffs, the girls decided to help you and went in search of, if not runaway, then at least new members of the herd. So the day passed. And another day. And yet. And more, more, more. The growing anxiety and fear in their eyes began to strain you more and more and you shared your worries with the others, they advised you to relax and not pay attention. You decided to follow their advice and put the subject out of your head. So summer passed, and then autumn. During this time, you managed to settle down in that clearing, dig a bunch of minks, organize warehouses for resources and food, and even recruit more NPCs, so your herd now consisted of as many as 100 fluffies, not counting your seven. It was a claim to success. Winter was ahead, which means you had to save up more food and you even managed. For this purpose you have assembled a long barn outside from branches, grass and leaves, rightly deciding that the winter cold will keep the food relatively fresh for much longer than if you stored it in some hole. The burrows were slightly deepened and thoroughly insulated with grass and leaves, no one began to bother with the underground passages between them, as well as the arrangement of a latrine underground. You were planning to start somehow taxing the fluffies that pass by and live with you by trimming them a little. to let the sheared fluff on the bedding and in general for warming, but then Matt said that the session was coming soon and the professors were fierce, so everything was after, at least in the spring. So you all decided to take a break until spring. After the end of the session, you and your friends decided to enter “the Game” again, but upon entering you were again prompted to select the character you want to play as and the level of difficulty. In bewilderment, you discussed the situation and came to the conclusion that most likely there was a server wipe and all data was reset, and you had neither the desire nor the opportunity to start over. So you’ve decided to quit the game and do the really important things: Education! So you and your friends just packed up all your SSDs with the game, and handed them over to freshmen you know, with instructions to try the Game, and when you get bored, pass it on to the next freshmen… A few more years passed, and you and your friends graduated, all with honors. Another couple of decades passed, and somehow it so happened that you, having passed the Game to freshmen, somehow created a kind of unofficial tradition: Playing it in the first or second year, which is like a privileged club. It began to be considered that those who played it for six months or more and quit a month before the session in the second year, and then passed it with excellent marks, would be accompanied by success in their endeavors and they would become as successful as the last 7 best students in the last 30 years that they just played it in their 2nd year. All of them achieved everything they wanted: one became famous in sports, the second rose to the rank of general of cyber troops, the third is a brilliant cybernetic engineer who founded his own company for the development and creation of cyber and bionic prostheses and augmentations, which have no analogues. There will be another half century, the fourth one became a famous actor, the rest (they were girls), became the wives of their friends and helped them in their work and life. It was also known that all 7 friends still live in the same estate and help each other in all endeavors. And everyone wants to repeat their achievements, but in their own way, which means it’s time for"The Game"!
P.S. Written & best read under Thornhill - Nurture, ecspecially their chorus)